10 online resources for free e-books

The paragraphs below are reposted from my old blog. I am taking part in the 2014 Goodreads Reading Challenge, and have currently read 79 books this year. My goal is to read 80, but as I’m already halfway into 3 further books, and am travelling to Norway and back before the end of the year, I expect I will surpass my goal! I get many of my books from the resources below, plus from the Kindle Daily Deal newsletter [UK link] [US link], so reading can be a really frugal hobby – and as a minimalist, e-books suit me perfectly. When you read as many books per year as I do, it is a more environmentally friendly choice as well – the CO2 involved in producing a Kindle is the same as for producing 23 paper books. I have read hundreds of books on my Kindle, so I’m definitely ‘in the green’. (I do still buy the occasional paperback, though – but they are mostly second-hand ones from local charity events.)

Old books and new technology – a perfect combination.

As you may have gathered by now, I am a bit of a bibliophile. If, like me, you enjoy reading the classics (Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen etc.) and other slightly older works, there is no need to pay for the books if you have an e-reader. The rules for when a work falls into the public domain (i.e. for when the intellectual property rights to the work expire) vary from country to country, but most books become public domain 50-70 years after they were first published.

My favourite resources are probably Project Gutenberg and eBooks@Adelaide. And please don’t be fooled by the title of HolyBooks.com – this site covers everything from alchemy to Zoroastrianism, and if you click on the ‘literature’ category you will also find works by Hamsun, Kafka, Gibran and Shakespeare. It is a little difficult to navigate, but definitely worth a look.

I’ve only recently discovered that you can also download books for free from Goodreads, so I will definitely need to explore that option further when I find the time.

Many (if not all) of the websites listed below also allow you to download the books in PDF format, so if you don’t have an e-reader you can also enjoy reading the books on your computer.

But that is enough ado for now – here are the links (listed in the order of discovery):